Everything was perfect in Dr Sinéad Gall’s life until her parents got divorced, which is to say, nothing was perfect. Growing up on a sheep station in Australia’s outback, she thought her parents bickering and fights were all part of a happy marriage. The truth is she simply lacked comparison. The nearest neighbour was a 25-minute flight away in her parents’ old Cessna TTZ, a trip they seldom took. And Sinéad’s instinctive need for a functional family was so great that she fitted the constant name-calling and lesions, as well as the occasional broken nose, into the picture. Finally, there was no one and nothing to contract her – until the divorce.

She moved with her mother to Melbourne. (Melbourne of all places!) Here, her mother overcompensated for having lived close to a decade with the wrong man. She went gangbusters. One partner followed another in a succession that was ambitious if nothing else. From having the same adult male in the house, Sinéad went to having a sequence of them, as Doug came after Stew came after What’s-his-name. That destroyed any last vestige of hope in human relationships which Sinéad may have had. In the end, she was glad when graduating from Melbourne’s Dandenong High School gave her the excuse to go away to study.

That she chose to study Rossumetics should come as no surprise. It was the only study course in the Australia which was only offered in one place – in Darwin, as far away from her mother on the other side of the country as it was possible to get. Due to her acquired lack of interest in forming a romantic bond with any member of the human race, male or female, she devoted all her time to her studies. It isn’t clear if she was truly talented in all matters regarding Rossum’s means of the organic growth of Robots. Maybe, her diligence alone was responsible for her unparalleled success. The fact is she excelled to such an extent that she landed a post in the laboratories on the island Rossum had chosen to carry out his initial research. And that at the age of only 31! Again, was it talent or diligence which in less than two years saw her leading the Research and Development Department on the island? We’ll never know.

One thing we do know, however, may come as a surprise. As Sverige Alquist was desperately searching for a copy of Rossum’s Secret Formula for Robot Production, he uncovered something which took his breath away. In the deepest, darkest corner of Dr Gall’s workstation, he came across a 1,000-page erotic novel. The heroine of this “dirty book” was a certain Gallia, whose libido was so great she made Sinéad’s mother look like a nun. Alquist never told anyone about the find, but next to the Bible, the novel was the one book which he never tired of reading.